


Fated?

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: (that's why I kept the summary so vague ahahaha), Arena Stickball, Beware, Character Analysis, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Hiveswap Act 1 Spoilers, I reference some things from Homestuck not yet revealed in Hiveswap, M/M, Pigeons, a little theorizing, but only a few I think, but will they?, people can change, protective friendship, the Grubbles/Grubbels, very early thoughts and stuff, we'll see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 12:34:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12108840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Joey and Xefros spend time together, not too long after the Act 1 credit sequence rolls.(Fated?  Psh, Joey says.  Psh.)





	Fated?

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Thanks so much for reading. :) I hope you enjoy this! Sorry, as always, if I got anything wrong.
> 
> ACT 1!! Ahhh!

Whenever Joey looked at what she now knew was Dammek’s last name insignia-thingy – the sign with the pointy sides like mini-antlers that he had on all his shirts and stuff –  branded on Xefros’s hover pad/hover sled/hover-whatever, she ended up thinking a lot about her home.

Not about the brother she’d left behind…  With his last, crackly words to her over the walkie-talkie, which she suspected had been him begging her to stay on their world with him, begging not to lose her, too.  Like their parents.  Like his pigeons.  Jude with his pogs scattered around all obnoxious and everywhere, assuring her without a trace of irony that he believed she could do whatever needed to be done…  No.  And not about her babysitter, Roxy, either, all blurry eyes and flippy blonde hair dyed pink at the tips.  All empty cupboards and sad, grown-up understandings sinking in. 

Nah.  She thought about _just how much_ Dammek might’ve been like her pa.

Piling his guns up absolutely everywhere?  Check.  Making choices for the people in his life without running anything by them first?  Check, again.  Taking something that wasn’t just for him to use – their manor, maybe, their home – and filling it with himself, himself all over?  _His_ stolen trinkets.  _His_ armies of sultry blue ladies.  All of it, check, check, check, just their whole world with his name scrawled over everything…  And even when he wasn’t around, they couldn’t exactly _escape_ him.  He was in the herds of abandoned, dusty globes.  He was in the carpets needlessly piled on top of other carpets, and the staring, hollowed-out animal shells that broke Joey’s heart.  Until she’d taken control of it herself, he had been in her own last name, too.  Erasing her mom’s touches.  Smothering out whatever she might have wanted for her children’s home, instead.

It would have been a little different, if he had taken Joey’s ballet shoes and scribbled “PA” all over them, but the point remained.  If Xefros and Dammek had been living together, probably Dammek would have done just what her pa did.  There would’ve been guns everywhere, then, too, and nothing would’ve ever stayed clean for long.  Everything would have been kept all dim and spooky, with clothes and spiky jewelry piled all around, and horrible giant bug-stew left to soak out on the table.  Xefros would carve out corners for himself, sure, just like Joey had.  But he’d still have had to wade through Dammek’s stuff to get anywhere at all.

Joey asked Xefros once if he’d be okay with her painting over Dammek’s symbol with something.  She wasn’t sure exactly what, at the time – maybe just slimy alien mud, until they could get some equally slimy alien paint.  Xefros had hissed out an apologetic, flimsy little laugh and shaken his head.  He’d said no, but maybe later, if he got the okay.  He said it with one of those little “X:)” smiles Dammek apparently liked to see.  But it was kind of a sad version of that smile, Joey thought.  Closed off and pinched, like Xefros was wincing a little but didn’t even know it yet.  It was basically the smile _opposite_ of when he’d been explaining the rules of Arena Stickball to her, swiping his arms around so much he swayed a little and almost fell off the deer cat’s back as they rode.  That was a wide open and eager smile, then.  The farther on they went, Joey thought she saw that smile more and more.  When they weren’t almost dying, of course.

Xefros smiled for real demonstrating his Arena Stickball bat thing against a tree they passed, for instance – it left a little dent, maybe, if Joey squinted.  He smiled for real joking about how they should’ve run back into his hive real quick and saved his famous athlete action figures before setting off to their meeting point.  Then Joey could’ve see them, and finally gotten how awesome they were.

 (Xefros had been bleeding when they left Outglut behind, of course, and everything around them had been either tumbling apart or on fire.  Nobody even thought about what was possibly going up in flames back in his hive until miles later, when Xefros’s huge sloth lusus got hungry and he realized he’d only grabbed one box of sloth treats.  Going upstairs for action figures was never really in question – Xefros explained that quickly, haltingly, and Joey said it was fine, shhh, she’d gotten the joke.)

Maybe they could paint over that symbol on the hover pad when Xefros didn’t miss his “Tetrarch” Dammek so much, Joey reasoned.  But Xefros just said that wasn’t going to happen, said they had been _fated_ to be moirails so it really wouldn’t be right if it did.  It wasn’t wrong to carry a piece of Dammek with them as they rode to their meet-up, if he could.  It hadn’t been wrong to follow after him for all those sweeps, aiming so carefully to walk right the footsteps Dammek laid out for him.

 It wasn’t wrong that he’d started thinking in Dammek’s voice, either, stringing together revolutionary protest lyrics and art pieces.  He chanted verses Dammek might have hopefully been proud of at random furniture…  He whispered them to Joey in nervous, awkward samples, to show her what kind of things the Grubbles/Grubbels sang about.  Dammek’s conditioning was better than what the rest of Alternia had taught him, Xefros said.  And Joey couldn’t really argue that organizing a revolution was something worthwhile.  Putting together an anarchist protest band in the face of an awful Heiress was brave, for sure.  She’d never doubted that Dammek was brave, or that the work he was doing was good.  That wasn’t the problem at all.

The way Xefros reasoned it, if he wasn’t thinking about Dammek and their rebellion wouldn’t he have just ended up recycling through and through all those old thoughts about becoming a butler?  Which cleaner fluids to use, where to put the silverware.  Etc, etc, etc, on into well-pressed and dusted oblivion.  That was Alternia’s plan for him.  Dammek, though.  _Dammek_ had a better plan.   

Between the two things he truly believed he was fated for – butling and Dammek – Joey didn’t think it was too surprising Xefros apologized just _so many_ times when he accidentally thwacked the back of her head getting really into his Arena Stickball explanations.  It made a sad, aching kind of sense.   

“We’re riding on Dammek’s lusus, though, right?  Isn’t that ‘piece of him’ enough?” Joey had tried.  She said it even though she was thinking of the lusus as her friend, too, by that point.  The creature hadn’t chosen to raise _her_ , though, when she was what Xefros called a “wiggler.”  That was something that tied the poor, beautiful creature to Dammek always, first and foremost and forever.  He’d just been hatched out of an egg, at the time, squirming around on a bunch of teeny sharp legs.  Not even pupated yet, and his whole body had been labeled from the start with dangerous, stomped-down lowblood fluids.

“Yeah, human babies don’t look much like that at all,” Joey said, when Xefros told her about wigglers.  “We look kind of like mini-humans.  With less hair.  And no teeth.”

“No teeth?” Xefros gasped.  “ _And_ your sad, stumpy claws?  Seriously, how did you not get eaten?”

“My mom was around, then,” Joey said.  “And she was _wonderful,_ remember?”  Joey had told Xefros only a little about her mother – how she could dance with the great ones, the stars of the stage.  How she was so elegant even Dammek’s deer cat dad would have envied her.  Eyes like velvet and skin that smelled so, so softly of flowers, of empty night skies, of hallways that were still clean and not full of random mummies and taxidermy projects.

“Oh, ya,” Xefros said, smacking himself on the forehead.  He did that a lot – smacking himself on the forehead, or the thigh.  It bugged Joey, honestly.  She imagined it was the kind of nervous tic that said a lot about his state of mind.  A little burgundy flush seeped across Xefros’s soft grey cheek, though, too, and a hesitant corner of his lip tweaked up.  “She would have pirouette-and-bop-ed anything that tried to eat you, I guess.  Like you did to the ‘monster serpent?’”

“Like I did to the _snake_ , yes,” Joey said, firmly.

Xefros nodded, apparently satisfied. 

Sometimes he forgot his embarrassment and held on to her jacket again as they rode.  That was when they had to go really fast, or duck into secret dark places to avoid a patrolling Subjugglator-in-Waiting with juggling pins strapped across their back and special stardust ground into their clown paint.  Xefros usually pulled his hands away really quickly, once he realized what he was doing – his claws were short and breakable, but they’d still scraped Joey’s sides accidentally a couple times.  He told her just being next to her was so, so warm, warmer than any troll could’ve been.  He’d walked her through the hemospectrum a while back – the blood caste system that put him right at the bottom, that had doomed him to stuttering apologies and a burning neighborhood.  He’d been right, you know – the Heiress had posted a selfie of his hometown in flames, and a quite frankly disturbing number of trolls had clicked a little heart button to say they liked it.

(A lot of trolls had clicked a little spade to say they hated, it, too, but when Joey acted like that was a good thing Xefros shrugged, doubtful, and tried to explain something called a “hate-crush” that Joey still wasn’t completely sure she understood.)    

The more Joey learned about being moirails, though, the more it seemed like something that _fate_ didn’t really have anything to do with.  That was just like saying that because a prince was _“supposed”_ to kiss a princess at the end of a fairy tale that was all the story had to offer – all the complexity of a real relationship, of what life would be if Prince Charming and Princess What’s-Her-Name had really breathed.  What did fate even know, anyway?  Did it know Xefros hated the idea of being a butler enough that even when he tried to seem all happy about it Joey could tell it tasted like old serpent – snake! – puke on his tongue?  Did it know that even if her pa had been _fated_ to have kids he’d have just ditched them anyway and headed on out for some exciting adventure-y nonsense in the Pacific?

Xefros said being someone’s moirail meant balancing them, meant bringing out the best in them.  Protecting them from the more dangerous sides of themselves.  But he hadn’t even believed it when Joey said there were pictures of him on Dammek’s screensavers, back in that cluttered, sour-smelling hive.  She’d had to swear up and down about it, had to bring it up later, even.  Like, _Why didn’t you think Dammek would have pictures of you?_

“He did?  Oh crap!  Whoa,” Xefros had said, when she finally convinced him.  A “X:0” face, to be sure.  “He really is good to me.  The Tetrarch worries about me, even when he really has no reason to!  Hah!  And he keeps _pictures_ of me, I guess?”

“ _You_ keep pictures of _him_ ,” Joey pointed out.  “Framed, you said.  I dunno, it kind of seems…  Fair?  That he’d want pictures of you, too?”

Xefros changed the subject, after that.  Something about wanting to know more about earth sports, and why exactly none of the players were supposed to use psychic abilities.

Joey didn’t know, though.  She’d never had a friend anything like Xefros, before – except maybe Jude and her babysitter, and she wasn’t really about to count them.  She sometimes thought that if _she_ had been “fated” or whatever to be Xefros’s moirail, she’d have gone about things differently.  She would’ve thought the “balancing” thing meant trying to keep him smiling honestly, keep him telling her when it stopped being okay to have him carry Byers the pigeon.  What Xefros said about moirallegiance sounded beautiful – love without the kiss-y, waltzing by moonlight kind of stuff.  The kind of love she’d never really had before, and had never really known to daydream about except in reminding her diary that she was trying – and failing – to make friends.

When Joey looked at Dammek’s symbol on Xefros’s hover sled, she really couldn’t help but think about her pa.  But when she looked at Xefros himself – at his goofy, honest expressions, at his nervous, fidgeting claws – she wondered what she could do to convince him that _fate_ was only what he made of it.  Maybe his fate _was_ Dammek.  But a better Dammek, the Dammek he would learn he deserved.   If her name was truly Joey Claire and definitely, definitely _not_ Joey Harley, then by that name and all it meant she would show him he deserved better. 

If Dammek was really “pale” for Xefros – that’s what the trolls called it, apparently – he would be willing to learn.  Willing to heal.  Sure he was probably staring off into the future all the time, off to a better Alternia his revolution might maybe help bring about.  He was all tangled up in his own thoughts, his purposes and plots.  What he horded all those weapons for, sure.  How all his secret codes would work, and how he might spin a web so vast and cunning it could even trap an Heiress.  But even with all those other things thundering like drums in his head, if Dammek really cared he could change.  Maybe he just didn’t know what he’d done to Xefros?  Maybe he just needed someone – a plucky teenage protagonist, perhaps – to show him how he was helping to grind his best friend into the dirt? 

Or maybe…  If that didn’t work…  If that wasn’t enough…

Maybe alien pale love was the sort of thing a girl could pick up while _also_ learning about extraterrestrial veterinary medicine and the revolutionary arts?

Maybe fate could go choke on some spice mix.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, I'm still sorting out a lot of my feelings about Act 1... Analyzing stuff, ahahaha. I'm definitely annoyed by how Dammek treats Xefros, but I'm hoping he would want to change that behavior if he understood it. But... Maybe he understands it and doesn't care? I guess we'll see... It's so great Joey wants to protect and support her new friend, either way. :') Awwww. Can't wait for the next Act!
> 
> Have a great day.


End file.
